It is odd how removal of DEI is framed as being political, when it is the other way round. DEI schemes were deeply political, and depended on who can claim to be the biggest victim.
That's...exactly the point of DEI statements! They are used to filter for "cultural fit", i.e. determine if you fit the political mold or at the very least capable of pretending you are with the most recent shibboleths.
I've literally seen faculty searches cancelled because there were too many white male applicants.
This is utter fantasy.
You are making a completely separate argument.
It is not, however, based on who can claim to be the biggest victim. It is based on a simple statistical analysis of demographics.
If I wanted racial purity in my collaborators it get a time machine to 1930s Germany. That someone was doing this in 2022 was extremely off-putting. That they were getting government support because of it makes the me not care much about the fact the system is being burned down today.
If you knew more about it than some memes about racism, you'd know that the nihilism, this thin-skinned "at least we'll take them with us" sentiment you just expressed, was at the heart of it. But they had a lost war and the 1920s to be bitter about, the treaty of Versailles, not someone who "couldn't shut up" about something. The mind boggles.
If being apathetic to a broken system makes you Nazi, what would be a better approach to the problem outlined by the person you were responding to? How would you keep political agents out of science institutions?
What kinds of damages would you think your descendants should be owed? If you heard that the restitution given was for those who managed to climb into the ivory tower of academia are now first in line for research grants... Sure, that's a trade.
There are many scholarships, grants, services, and opportunities for descendants of Holocaust victims who had their property and lives taken from them. Do you support that? What's the difference?
> That they were getting government support because of it makes the me not care much about the fact the system is being burned down today.
I just want you to sit with that sentence for a minute. You'd rather have no publicly funded science, you'd rather have the entire enterprise collapse, just because of some people are getting research funding because they are descendants of genocide victims? Seriously?
Proponents of these policies want to have it both ways; they're at one moment just this small thing that nobody should be bothered by, but in the next moment a nonnegotiable bedrock principle that they are unwilling to stop doing, even under threat of losing funding.
It happens indirectly all the time. As of 2025, despite all the funding cuts, the AAAS is still publishing its yearly DEI report, now rebranded as an "Inclusivity for Excellence Report", but containing all of the same stuff: an effort to collect and publish as much demographic data as possible, and a stated goal of getting all the numbers to go in the "right" direction. These practices are too ingrained and sacrosanct at this point to let a mere funding crisis throw them off course.
> These practices are too ingrained and sacrosanct at this point to let a mere funding crisis throw them off course.
Yes, some people have egalitarian principles. As much as you think there is a conspiracy against your group to keep you down it's just not true.
Academics could broaden their horizons and consider the possibility that there are multiple perspectives on egalitarianism, and that the public that funds them is quite split on the issue. If Science is really the priority, it should be easy to stay neutral on unrelated contentious social issues. But I guess it's more fun to preach and condescend to people who disagree, and then complain when those people don't want to fund your enterprise anymore.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/cost...
US science is in chaos not because of pushback against this evil "demographic tracking and reporting", but rather an extremely capricious attitude towards any research from the administration. This isn't about the practices of the universities choosing who gets a grant. The administration is terminating random grants based on keywords that they find in the abstracts even if the keyword has nothing to do with evil DEI.
> If Science is really the priority, it should be easy to stay neutral on unrelated contentious social issues.
Science is being used to study these contentious social issues. That's the kind of science that's getting suppressed, _but that's not even the issue here_
Yes, it's terrible what the English did in Ireland.
Disagree. This is just defaulting to "it makes one of the political poles angry, it must be political".
DEI isn't about achieving or gaining political power for "the left", but anti-DEI is absolutely about gaining political power for the right-wing reactionaries.
DEI didn't just come from nowhere. Data supports the idea that groups with more diversity and representation are not only more fair, but also more efficient and robust. The point of DEI was to make our systems stronger by helping everyone participate. That means addressing structural problems that discourage and even prevent many people from participating. DEI didn't just come about because they wanted to see fewer white faces and more brown faces. It's actually based on Science!
There are just too many right-wing reactionaries, and as a society we humor them too much! Everything feels threatening to right wing reactionaries. They're afraid of vaccines for fuck sake! They believe that "DEI = hating white people". Learning new things threatens the cultivated ignorance that keeps their political masters able to control them, which is ironic because the little house cats think they they are lions.